out what drives me crazy about Starbucks. It’s not just that they’re all 'Woke Folk' (though they are) it’s that they’re having so much damn fun. It always irks me when the waiting staff at a restaurant is having more fun than I am. I mean they may frolic privately — but they should hide it, because their job is to serve you so that you will have fun. They are not the pleasure seekers but the purveyors of pleasure, and as such they should remain polite but silent. Strolling into any Starbucks is like attending a trans birthday bash in somebody's private home, all 'The Young Wokies' are whipping out their politically correct ‘isms, cooing their pet names at each other and sharing private inscrutable 'Woke Jokes.' Sorry guys. but I should be the one partying, not you. This used to drive me crazy years ago when I first 'came out.' It was fashionable then, to eat at Bemelmen's on Bloor. Of course all the waiters were gay, and probably screwing each other in the washrooms or the kitchen, and having a grand old gay time. And here I was, young and unsure of my new gay self, and as yet, unlaid, as I was finding it impossible to navigate the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. I resented those waiters terribly and even imagined they were laughing at me. (They probably were, as I sported an unruly curly mop top in those days, very unfashionable, which it took me nearly ten years to shave off so that I might morph into a respectable, if not exceedingly attractive, faggot.) If all this may strike you as classist, it is. I inherited it from my mother who was dastardly to all waiterly persons, in fact to any staff anywhere. Especially cab drivers. She considered all working people her private servants, and treated them with the utmost disdain. One time she was in Port Elgin (she had followed an abusive man there; he wore 'transition lenses' — never trust anyone who wears those) and she was out in a taxi with her friend in some 'hell-and-gone' byway outside Port Elgin. Well, she started yelling at the cab driver and he (good for him) threw her and her friend out into a field in the middle of nowhere, and promptly disappeared (needless to say my mother and her friend survived). In restaurants with her I wanted to hide my head in shame because she was always browbeating some hapless waiter or other. I wanted to whisper —“I’m sorry, even though she is my mother I know she’s a relentless bitch!’” The reason she was so classist is because she was working class -- her father was a farmer (my grandfather died young, mysteriously, in a barn fire) and my grandmother was a single mother and a teacher with no money. Because my mother (before she met my middle class father) spent most of her life struggling to make ends meet it was absolutely necessary for her to pretend she was rich, and to condescend to the 'little people.' For awhile she lived at The Sutton Place i.e. in a hotel. The moral of this (yet another tale of my mother) is that those who are most classist are often those from humble beginnings, as it is incumbent on them to shroud their origins in mystery. Noel Coward was such a person; he was born in a working class suburb and his father used to demonstrate organs in an organ store (sounds filthy doesn’t it?). Noel changed his accent, dressed up (but not too much, as he didn’t want to appear effeminate) and fooled most of the world into believing he was very upper class indeed -- which explains his affection for Princess Margaret and The Royals. Just a poor boy trying tomake good, and incidentally lying-- like a very fancy Persian rug. Noel Coward was the quintessential homosexual and always will be. Most gay men aspire to be like straights, and to be loved by them. Ever since gay marriage there’s been a kind of epidemic of this (though I’ve heard the the young are rejecting gay marriage, and I do hope so.) All this explains why you hate homosexuals so much. I know, I certainly do. (At last, the cats out of the bag, of course, I’m homophobic!) Most gay men are odious, pretentious, and repellent. But wouldn’t you be too -- if you’d gone through what they have? They resemble what James Joyce used to call ‘the New Irishman.’ These detestable men made a performance of not drinking and not being carefree and imaginative, but instead posed as down-to-earth, respectable citizens. Joyce found these ‘new’ Irishmen alarmingly pompous and wished them all dead. I must say I sometimes feel the same way about my own kind. Gay men are not effeminate because they take it up the ass, but because they are prissy, purse-lipped and uptight. They are the very definition of hypocrisy.“I draw the line there,” they say -- "I will be pissed upon but no one defecates on me!” Well, La-te-da. When Christopher Newton was my lover many years ago (I’m trying to impress you now) he educated me in table manners -- as he said I would someday be invited to grand gay houses fro dinner. Needless to say I wasn't. I still chow down in my own way, thank you, and have no illusions about it. And of course, I’m not talking about food.
